Gender, sexuality, feminist studies, modern Japanese literature, theater, and film studies. Author of Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor; Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism.
19th- and 20th-century French fiction; science and literature; spatial theory; urbanism; popular crime fiction; the nouveau roman; Optiques: the Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (2006); Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Space and Science in French Crime Fiction (2016); and Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics, co-edited with Robert Rushing (2018).
Hebrew and Israeli literature combining psychoanalytic, biographical and cultural-historical approaches. Lo Kabrosh: Gilgule Imagim Ve-tavniyot Be-shirat Yehuda Amichai [Not Like a Cypress: Transformations of Images and Structures in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai] (1994); Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet (UPNE 2008).
I work on late 17th- and 18th-century France, and my research tends to be situated at the intersection of material culture and the history of the book. Special interests include the history of women’s writing in France and the history of the novel. My most recent books: The Queen’s Embroiderer (2018) and How Paris Became Paris (2014).
Research Interests:
Comparative views of Latin America, American, and Latino literatures, critical theory, cultural practices. Nuevas cartografias latinoamericanas(Letras Cubanas: Havana, 2006), Split-States and Global Imaginaries (Verso, 2007).
Max Cavitch's chief areas of interest include early American literature, poetry and poetics, psychoanalysis, and cinema. Current projects include an article on the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian director Safaa Fathy and Jacques Derrida, as well as a book-in-progress called Mad Poet of Philadelphia: Toward a New Literary Psychohistory.
Modern European intellectual and cultural history. Books include Karl Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge, 1999; paperback 2001), European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford, 2007), and Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy(Columbia University Press, 2012).